Okay, Computer: Exploring Radiohead's New App

Being someone who plays videogames means sitting through a lot of fizzled hype. You'll hear how the newest Call of Duty provides the most realistic combat experience ever, and play it only to realize it’s still a game about shooting people in the face. Some of this has to do with the aggro-bro demographic of gamers begging for more face-shooting experiences; some of it has to do with the ineluctable tech dogma that more complex and more realistic makes for a better game. It's a back-and-forth between guiding aesthetics, and it's not always clear which side is pulling ahead.

This is what makes it a little joyous when something as weird as Flappy Bird becomes a phenomena, because it validates the idea that gamers don’t mind going against the grain—that there are many roads and paths to take when figuring out how to deliver a user experience. For example, Radiohead didn’t invest millions of dollars in creating a shooter where you play the “King of Limbs,” a grim-faced monarch bent on taking back his homeland one body at a time. Instead, they released a free app called PolyFauna based off the song “Bloom” from The King of Limbs, an app which attempts to do for your eyes what the song does for your ears. "It comes from an interest in early computer-life experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious," Yorke said. That’s a way of saying that the game has purposefully dinky visuals and no set purpose—it’s for you to figure out, not anyone else.

The obvious antecedent is Bjork’s Biophilia app—which she released in conjunction with the album of the same name— but that was more elaborate an experience: You had to pay more for it, and you had to learn how to use it. PolyFauna, on the other hand, is free and relatively simple to pick up. You begin as a distended presence hanging in the middle of the air of some randomly generated environment, with parts of “Bloom” playing in the background. You can write on the screen, and whatever lines you trace will be instantly chopped up and mutated into something resembling a polygonal centipede. Pretty soon, you figure out that you move in the game by turning your phone (and with it your body), and a box prompts you to follow a flashing red dot whenever it appears on screen. Move toward the dot, and you’ll hear the music pick up speed before some low-bit "Doom" sound effect shatters the screen into another environment with a different color palette and geographical layout.

As you move between worlds, different elements of “Bloom” filter in. Ghostly moaning will score your exploration of some snow-topped mountains; militaristic percussion will take you over a blood-red desert. You’ll be taken through Lynchian forests filled with dead trees and rain, all-white fields where a solar eclipse hangs in the distance, mountain ranges that seem pulled from hell (Alternate app title: Fake Digital Trees). Sometimes, a wireframe moon can be seen in the sky; sometimes, it’s hidden behind fog, only revealing itself as you move closer. It’s hard to tell how much of this is random, but some of it is by design—in some stages, the specks of volcanic ash or some kind of detritus floating around move in synchronicity with the drums. In others, you’re just zooming around. The suggested effect is ambiguous, but an easy interpretation is the visual replication of Yorke’s lyrics even as his voice is missing from the instrumentals. In the absence of a lyric like “so I lose and start over,” you’re constantly breaking through to a new world; in the absence of “turning in somersaults” is the physical sensation of constantly turning so that you don’t lose track of the dot.

It’s a pleasant experience, if not a little anticlimactic. After about thirty minutes of spinning around in my bedroom with the lights turned off to maximize the effect—it should be noted that playing this in public will get you some weird looks—I decided to tap out and reflect on what I’d seen. I don’t know if it ends—if Yorke’s voice floats in at some point, or if the changing landscapes begin to focus into some thematic conclusion. The average time a fan spends bothering with it may depend on whether they’re able to get stoned without ruining their day. There’s the possibility, though, that a conclusion isn’t really relevant—that the experience, however long you choose to have it, is the point. After all, here’s another lyric on “Bloom”: “Don’t blow your mind with why.”